Great information & a good summary, thank you! If I’m looking to get more in-depth with the known mechanisms of locus coeruleus and episodic memory, would you be able to recommend any sources of yours?
To try and tickle your interest, here’s why I’m looking into it: I have no episodic memory. I have aphantasia. I have hypotheses for explanations that I’m looking to correlate with different pieces of research, and locus coeruleus interactions is one area I have yet to look sufficiently deeply into.
I do often share this sentiment, even if I’m not in agreement with your tone. But I’m curious —
> Specific qualia have a higher cortical resonance, due to overarching reinforcement over time, and they are picked out.
> The more a single stream of information is focused on, the greater degree of resonance that may occur with less endowed qualia (slow down, notice more shit due to neuro-satiation).
How did you come upon these conclusions, or this framing? I’m surprised, because what you’re saying meshes well with some details of a model for the neurophysiological basis of conscious experience I’ve been working on… and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else point out these exact connections before.
For all I know this could be general knowledge in some community; or something believed widely at one time, now discredited. I’m operating in a vacuum and have been putting things together from what to me appear to be first principles. I might be reconstructing common knowledge, or just unknowingly restating things I’ve unconsciously absorbed in the past… The potential for which bothers me now that I’m seeing your comment.
Where’s your perspective coming from? :) Pointers to your sources would be much appreciated.
In case you like narrow but Victor’s not your thing, I can enthusiastically point you towards Iosevka. (That’s also available in Victor’s comparison picker. Nice!)
I’m thinking your reference to composing red functions doesn’t seem congruent with your desire to discuss algebraic effects. Composing arbitrarily many red functions, or blue functions, is a solved problem. (I won’t mention the lingo knowing many in the audience to be allergic.) Composing functions with heterogenous, or completely arbitrary, colors is much less so. That’s what the article is about, too, is it not - combining blue and red? But I might well be missing something deeper here, perhaps you’ll enlighten the reader :)
I would be really keen on seeing a mainstream-ish language that does algebraic effects or that can even implement them in a legitimate sense (discounting React’s implementation here, for instance). Purescript tried, but are doing something different these days. https://purescript-resources.readthedocs.io/en/latest/eff-to...
By 'red' I was referring to anything effectful, whether that be concurrency, IO, state, or otherwise. Composing any one effect is a solved problem (e.g. monad); composing arbitrarily many effects is a lot harder. Recent languages like Koka describe effects over the free monad; because they are described over a single monad, and this single monad composes, effects compose.
I am by no means an expert in this area, but I hope this clarifies the intent of my original comment. What transformations and/or constraints exist for composable heterogeneous effects?
> the compact camera market is dying.
> Olympus just sold off their camera division.
And someone _bought_ that camera division. With the intent to continue designing, manufacturing and selling cameras under the Olympus brand. Sure, Olympus wasn’t doing great, but someone paid money because they thought they could run the business better. And their consumer business is in selling compact cameras, right? There appears to be at least some faith in the market.
> We probably won't see many new models from Canon
Personally I sure hope so. Their less-than-full-frame offering has been pretty lackluster afaict, other companies are doing the job better. We’ve lately seen some surprisingly kickass tech innovation in the full frame market from Canon, though. I hope they continue to focus their efforts.
The paper explicitly states that it’s about Functional Relational Programming, so that’s verifiably correct. I’m not sure if I can agree, though.
> It actually doesnt have much to do with "reactive" programming model as we know it today
What would you say is the ”reactive” model as we know it today?
If you asked me what FRP is, I’d tell you about Functional Reactive Programming. Maybe I’d point you to Conal’s writings[0] or something like Your Mouse is a Database[1]. Andre Staltz did a nice writeup on how it’s useful to think of FRP in more broader terms than the original definition would require[2]:
> it would make sense to talk about "functional reactive programming" as a paradigm or an idea where you build applications using listenable event streams (or "signals"), creating and composing them using pure functions
For me, that’s the spirit of FRP. And when I read Out of the Tarpit, that’s exactly what jumps at me. The paper seems to describe data that’s changing over time, and other data being derived from those such that when the original data changes, so does the derived one. That’s pretty much precisely Functional Reactive Programming to me, even if the words are different.
You might have another sense of the words in mind; I’d like to understand what you think, and why.
The author seems to be referencing a project of theirs with a Finnish name, so perhaps my intuition as a native Finnish speaker can help. In Finnish you’d likely pronounce pijul [pi-jul]. If I were to pronounce the word ”in English” starting from that basis, the smallest change is, I think, to make it [pi-zhul]. That is, ”pee-jewel” but with short vocals instead of long ones for both words.
My personal take is that io-ts _is_ typescript’s aeson, but if you’re scared of the baggage it comes with then how about giving zod a try? https://github.com/vriad/zod
I have a hypothesis that this condition and ADHD are related. ADHD researcher Dr Russell Barkley links Vygotsky’s theories of childhood development to the mechanism by which ADHD interferes with executive function [0]. An ADHD brain would be less capable of imagining things and holding those images, which would lead to failure in development of self-directed action via those imagined images. Is this ”aphantasia”? I’m not sure, but I find it plausible.
The prevalence for ADHD has been cited at 5% in children and half of that in adults. A commenter here says aphantasia has been guessed to be at 1-3% [1], which would be a rough match. Another commenter describes their ADHD and aphantasia [2], and I am under the impression this has been reported often. If there was a causal relation I would expect to see these kinds of overlaps in the data, but it’s really the researcher’s description of a failure of imagination that makes this hypothesis especially interesting to me.
I don’t have ADHD, I’m pretty laid back actually, but I don’t have a mind’s eye.
I was 30 or so before I realised “the mind’s eye” wasn’t a metaphor, and people really could visualise things in their head. My brain doesn’t work like that, but I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature...
I remember things using rules. Whenever, for example, I need to tell someone to turn right or left, the mantra “I write with my right” pings off, somewhere in my head. It just did, writing this. It’s the way I remember facts, apparently rules are much easier than random facts.
But how could that be a feature ? Well I can build fiendishly complicated mental models layering rules on top of rules. I can’t see them, but I can use them to predict results, and it gives me insights that most people don’t grasp without the explanation that I’ve just discovered for them. My brain just makes these rulesets up, examines, discards, and reformulates them without conscious effort. I get the end result, and (most times) a consequence-chain back to the problem starting conditions.
I do wonder if being forced to figure stuff out without the ability to visualise is what made me have what I consider my primary skill - the ability to look at something, conceptualise how it could work relationally, solve the problem in my head, and only then justify that solution by working back from that solution to the problem I was trying to solve in the first place.
For the people I work with, it sometimes seems like magic. For me, it’s Tuesday. I do sometimes wish I had a mind’s eye, but I think what I do have makes up for missing out, just in a different way. So as I said, bug or feature, it’s really not that clear to me - I could see the argument from both sides... :)
Very strongly agreeing with this assessment and hoping Colin will come to agree.
A zero-argument function is either a constant, or a side-effect. Given we don’t want a side-effect, exposing a constant instead of an effectful-looking function is preferable.
To try and tickle your interest, here’s why I’m looking into it: I have no episodic memory. I have aphantasia. I have hypotheses for explanations that I’m looking to correlate with different pieces of research, and locus coeruleus interactions is one area I have yet to look sufficiently deeply into.